Shadows in the White City (12 page)

“Yes, sir!”

Ransom tapped the roof of the cab with his cane and the carriage was off. “To one-twenty-nine Des Plaines,” he shouted to the driver.

As the carriage picked up the pace, he quietly said to himself, “I need a drink, and I know where I don't have to pay for it.”

He'd go home, clean the stockyard stench from himself, send out his clothes to that Chinese place halfway down the
block, and once these chores were accomplished, he'd stroll to Philo Keane's studio home on Kingsbury Lane. Perhaps he might just enjoy the feel of warm sunshine on his face, smell the last blossoms on the wind, watch birds chase one another amid the trees of a neighborhood park, think of Jane out of her Tewes getup, and get his mind off this horrid case…at least for a time.

 

The word went out and they found Ransom at Philo's where he was enjoying a brandy, a cigar, and Beethoven on Philo's phonograph. Philo was talking about a series of photos he'd begun taking of ordinary homeless people all across the city. Ransom was hardly hearing this, but Philo had grown animated and spoke of the possibilities of a montage of such photos, if only he could find a venue for them. He was saying that perhaps if he worked on whatever small conscience Thom Carmichael had left, that perhaps with Thom's help, he could get the photos placed in the
Herald
as a poignant exposé, as he called it. “Certainly could use the money.”

“When couldn't you use extra green, Philo?”

“But, Rance, it's more than about the money this time.”

Ransom didn't take this too seriously, and so he grunted at all the appropriate moments, but he really just wanted to drink and hear the music. Then when Philo insisted he listen and Philo repeated that it wasn't a job for money, Alastair capitulated. “All right, all right. Never known you to minimize the monetary aspects of a job, that's all.”

But this peaceful time was interrupted when a messenger—a junior officer in uniform and a friend, Mike O'Malley, knocked, knowing he could find Alastair here. O'Malley had bad news to impart.

“Another child found dead?”

“Dead and butchered…like a bloody knacker got at her.”

“Another girl?”

“Aye.”

Philo joined Alastair, grabbing his Night Hawk for photos, and as an afterthought, he slipped a single photo into his breast pocket. Alastair saw this but said nothing. They had then rushed to the scene, as Mike had wisely commandeered transportation for them. Along the way, Philo recalled how Alastair had returned his Night Hawk, evidence of their friendship. Now the two friends traversed the city and soon stood staring over the carnage.

Ransom's knee-jerk reaction on seeing the dead child was to say, “She's a local girl.”

“How can you know that?” asked Dr. Tewes, who had arrived on scene after Ransom and Philo. They had sent for Dr. Fenger to come as well to preside over the newly discovered remains; Tewes had come along with Dr. Fenger, apparently with him, when he had learned of the most recent find.

“Her clothing,” Alastair replied to Jane dressed as Tewes.

“You mean the tatters hanging on her?”

“Yeah…what's left of the blue dress with the yellow buttons. She was wearing that when she vanished. It's in the missing-persons file.”

“Expensive clothes for a young woman not yet out of her teens.”

“All from Fields, including her shoes,” added Alastair. “Besides, I have seen her on her rounds. She works and lives somewhere in my area, or did.”

“She worked? At her age?”

“Don't be naive. Half the children in the city work.”

“How can you be sure it's her? You can't possibly make out her features.”

“What features?” asked Philo, snapping off another shot with his Night Hawk. “But Alastair is correct. It's Alice Cadin, all right.”

“It's her, Cadin, Alice Cadin,” Ransom repeated the name in a tone of eulogy.

Philo then pulled forth a photograph of the girl from his breast pocket. Fenger and Tewes studied the girl in the blue
frock with yellow flowers. “I'd asked the family for it. Made duplicates. Takes good professional equipment, but I photographed the photograph, you see, since they had no negatives, and it worked fairly well. I mean from a professional point of view it is appalling and it's technically—”

“Shut up, Philo,” Ransom put in.

“Did what I could.”

“Don't be modest, Philo,” said Alastair, who then spoke to Jane and Christian. “He spread the photo to every police district, every station house.”

“She'd gone missing for over a week.” Christian measured the depth of a wound over the heart as he spoke. “Others've gone missing as well.

Philo said, “Alice was a hard worker, her parents told me. She wasn't homeless, but she loved the lakefront and the park. The last time they saw her, she'd gone off with friends to the park. Darkness came on, and she didn't come home. They never saw her again.”

“What of the friends she went off with?”

“They left her on the path for home, or so they tell it.”

“Still…given the disfigurement, how can you be sure?” asked Tewes.

“The blond hair,” Ransom replied.

“The flowered blue dress,” Philo repeated. “The yellow buttons, the shoes.”

“It all fits, down to her size,” added Ransom.

“Now I must inform the parents.” Fenger kept his steady hands at work over the corpse.

Philo, over his initial shock, continued taking photos from every angle.

Alastair stood looking out over the Chicago River, the killer's dumping ground of choice, pacing in a small circle with his cane, favoring a backache. He smelled Tewes's cologne behind him. “Drops them in the water like so much trash, the bastard.”

“Why not?” she asked, equally angry. “The river's still seen as the city toilet. Everyone disregarding the law and
health issues as if they mean nothing. So what might you expect from a child killer?”

“Turns my stomach what's happening.”

“We're going to catch this monster, Alastair.”

“We? Tell me, Dr. Tewes, by what magic do you propose to help this investigation? How do you propose to tell us what is in the mind of a man who would do this to a child—repeatedly so? Will your mind-reading, your phrenology, get us into his bloody mind?” Ransom's voice had raised more than he'd wanted, and everyone else looked to the pair only momentarily, realizing some things never changed. It was obvious to all that Ransom did not want Dr. Tewes anywhere near his case.

“How will I get into this madman's mind and help your investigation?” asked Jane as Tewes. “By the clues he leaves.”

“There are none.”

“Wrong,” Jane countered.

“How so?”

“He is leaving observable patterns.”

“All I observe is his butchery.”

“Even his cuts have left patterns, Ransom.”

“Whataya mean?”

“I've looked over the autopsies and either this fiend is ambidextrous and slashes and carves with both hands, or there are
two
of them cutting away at the body, if not more.”

“You can tell that?”

“Christian will verify it; it was his discovery, but I agree.”

Ransom sighed heavily and shook his head and looked out over the city from this perspective, a nearby garbage heap acting as a city for rats.

“Alastair, I am working closely with Christian, and we are prepared to make certain assumptions about the killer based on the very tools he uses and the cuts he has taken out of these…these poor children.”

“Indeed. And how is that progressing? Are you sharing, or is this all for Senator Chapman's benefit?”

“Chapman? He's got nothing to do with our teaming up, if that's what you mean. Look, Alastair, there've been several different blades identified by Fenger and myself.”

“Several different blades?”

“And all have varying sizes and lengths. One is more or less a cleaver. Others are smaller blades. One or two have definite large hilts that have left patterns against the skin, meaning some of the stab wounds were so furious as to drive the weapon to the hilt, fracturing bone beneath.”

“This can all be deduced by measurement, I understand, but what does it say about the kind of mental state that can do this kind of turkey carving on children?”

“After the initial attack, the deep tissue stab wounds, Ransom, every cut is meticulous, thought out…and it may have—that is each cut may have some sort of ritualistic purpose or meaning for the killer.”

“Do you mean to say each stab wound is symbolic?”

“No, not the stabbing, no. The carving up afterward. They are not all stab wounds.”

“I got that. Hell, I can see that.”

“In fact, none of the killings are what we traditionally call murder by stab wound,” added Dr. Fenger, coming nearer, overhearing.

“What then are they, these killings?”

“We suspect a couple of things: a kind of barbaric ritual from the old world for one.”

“Human sacrifice?”

“Something of that nature, yes.”

“Each killing leads to something in the nature of a carving, and the areas carved from the bodies are…well…edible.”

“Including the entrails?”

“Including the entrails.”

All of them fell silent at the thoughts and images raised by this.

“So, Dr. Fenger, are you telling me now that these children were carved up for their meat, like a knacker does a
horse, like a butcher slaughters a sow? Are you definitely confirming this?”

“That is what we are leaning toward, yes.”

“Then you're saying none of the wounds on the Chapman girl were deadly in and of itself, that she died of multiple stab wounds and was then later, after death, carved up?”

“Evidence tells us that some of the carving up went on before the Chapman girl was completely dead.”

“Like the taking of her nose, ears?”

“Correct.”

“How can you know that?”

“It's a theory but it has to do with the coloration around the wounds,” explained the medical genius, Fenger. “Blood in the living rises to meet the knife, but not in a corpse where we'd see no color. In most of the knife wounds found on Anne Chapman, the color isn't there.”

“As a result,” said Jane, “we theorize death ensued due to a blow to the head—before any of the major cuts.”

“Earlier, I proved to myself that he dispatched them
before
he cleaved off their flesh,” added Dr. Fenger.

“How then was the last victim killed? A blow to the head, strangulation? What?”

“Alice Cadin over there was stabbed to death.”

“How was she lured into this?”

“Sorry…we haven't a clue as to that.” Fenger tugged at his beard.

“No intoxication, no poison?”

“Poison is hard to determine without testing her fluids, and that takes time, but I have a fine man on it. Dr. Joseph Konrath.”

Ransom and Jane both knew that Konrath was a rarity, a man who'd pursued the alliance of the study of poisons—toxicology—and crime fighting, a new direction begun in the 1840s with the breakthrough in the infamous Marie Lafarge case, breakthroughs shared by two men working independently of one another—Frenchman Dr. Mathieu Orfila and Englishman Dr. James Marsh, who invented the process that
could detect gas arsine, produced when arsenic is heated to the correct temperature. Konrath carried on a fifty-year-old tradition nowadays of seeking out gases in any number of bodily tissues and fluids to determine if poisoning were present in the deceased.

“But such things as belladonna are easily accessed nowadays.”

“There've been no sign of any narcotic or poison in earlier victims, Alastair.”

“Whoever this so-called Leather Apron is, we suspect rampant cannibalism,” said Jane. “I suspect most cannibals don't stop to use poison. Wouldn't want to spoil the…the meal.”

“Why'd he take her eyes?”

“Usually the first to go…soft tissues, a delicacy for a cannibal,” said Fenger.

Alastair began tamping his unlit pipe. “Christian, what do you know of cases of cannibalism?”

Fenger took in a deep breath and exhaled. “All right, you've found me out, Rance. I've not
ever
handled a case like this, but I am reading up on it, you can bet.”

“Rampant cannibalism of children. God…what has the world come to?” asked Ransom, not expecting an answer.

“Actually, it was not so very long ago that Jonathan Swift wrote his answer to the problem of the homeless children of London,” began Jane, “that the government should round them up and feed them to the populace.”

“Swift was satirizing,” said Christian, “to bring the problem to the attention of Parliament and the Crown.”

“Well, the Vanishings is not satire,” replied Alastair. “This is real.”

Alastair asked again, “OK, so what do you think you know about this madman?”

She ticked off a number of beliefs. “He is ingratiating, charming, luring the victim; he lives in the city and knows every avenue and byway.”

“He likely uses candy or a drink
possibly
laced with some narcotic we can't detect,” added Fenger.

“That's any soft drink on the market,” Ransom said, recalling the boy, Sam, who so easily gulped down the soft drink that he'd been offered.

Jane continued, stating the obvious. “As he uses multiple blades, he is either in a profession relying on blades or is a collector.”

“That narrows it down for us,” he chided. “Look, Jane, have you given thought to the notion that since there're multiple blades used, that there just might be a violent gang or nutty religious cult using cannibalism as a kind of badge of honor or an initiation, or both? Each gang or cultist with his own blade, racking up points with their leaders.”